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My Musings

So today is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States and so I thought maybe I would post my ethics rubric from this semesters course.

In response to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail, I will share of few of my thoughts on the letter. In a time when racial injustice was commonplace in the United States, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives us an opportunity to see how a negative concept can be reformed into an ideal of positive growth and a catalyst for progress. The ideal for Dr. King’s proposal was not one to do with the bounds of some lesser law of the land. The ideal was much greater than that. It didn’t have as much to do about the differences between skin color or social standing or position. It had everything to do with a higher moral law. A law not of man, but of mankind. A law of humanity. This was the ideal that Dr. King Jr. was trying to convey. An ideal that superseded the fickle and wavering law of man. It is the law that preserves us all. The natural law. The law that every human being on this planet is born into this world in the same fashion; that every soul is born free. Dr. King Jr. speaks to those who would have his demonstration discontinued. He writes not because his words may be profound or because he feels he has something to gain by doing so. No, Dr. King Jr. writes this letter because it is necessary not only for the oppressed in his time but for the oppressed at all times. He writes this letter because in so doing he will invoke the reason and logic in the minds of those who cannot fight the urge to heed it. It is one thing for a man to hold on to ideas that may be in thought and word convincing, it is another to hold on to those ideals because the demonstration of them produces positive results in a tangible way. Dr. King Jr.’s letter is read today because of those ideals because those ideals yesterday and today still ring true. That mankind must listen to freedoms ring. That all those who strive to fulfill the American dream should know that it is rooted in freedom, dressed with the scars of the triumphant oppressed and honored with the stripes of the same red blood that flows through the veins of every human being on the planet. Justice is blind it sees no color, race, creed, sexuality or social status. Justice delivers its blow to the just and the unjust alike. There is no escaping its infallibility as it conducts its actions against the moral code. Dr. King Jr. spoke of how to obey an unjust law is a sin and to disobey an unjust law was our duty. To this ideal, I feel his letter gives us the magnitude of his words that should we be willing to uphold unjust laws for the sake of an “evil peace” than we are no better than those who condone the unjust law’s creation.

Ever watch a movie, read a book, watch a TV show and think,”I would have done something different there because that is so not what a person would really do or the delivery is not at all relatable”?

Well I was tired of doing that, so I decided to write my own story. A story where I am in control, and where my characters do things that real people would actually do, because I can relate to a character who is not sure they would jump for joy at having to save the world, if they had failed to save everyone else they cared about.

So I write the story that should have been written in the first place. I am a firm believer that adding joy to the world is better than adding the dressiness of reality. If I am writing fantastical fiction than it should not be a tragedy but a triumph something that inspires hope not the hopeless gut wrenching truth that is the human condition.

If I wanted to do that then I would write non-fiction. So if my writing delivery seems lackluster to a seasoned writer, but is eaten up by the readers then who is right in this situation? The veteran that doesn’t change with the times is destined to be left behind while the world around them changes.

Sorry for the rant. Just got a critique on my book, and the reader said that the book was not going to sell because I gave the reader everything they wanted and only one person died, and by doing that, it made it unrealistic. ITS A WORK OF !@%!@%$@# FICTION!! It’s suppose to be unrealistic.

I hear what the reader is saying. And while I can see his general viewpoint I refuse to write stories that pull at the emotions of the readers only to leave them empty and wondering. What good does writing do if it evokes the emotions of hate, disdain and regret.

Would anyone argue the point, that those kinds of stories do the world any good?

Did anyone see the Movie The Grey? What was the emotional roller-coaster for, to prove the writer could evoke your emotions and massage his ego? The movie left you empty with a hopeless outcome. My wife and the couple we were watching with felt the same way, are we not entitled to feel that way? We paid for the story, it just didn’t deliver for us.

Don’t get me wrong some tragedies serve their purpose in teaching a lesson, as in the story of Romeo and Juliet. But their is no reason, in my opinion, to bring to the world a story in which their is no more usefulness than to point out that the world sucks.

So to bring this all back full circle, the only critique really worth weighing is the one whose publishing your work, the reader who is reading it, and the customer who is buying it.

So recently, I decided to go back to school. I turn forty on the 26th, and well, that just seems a bit long in the tooth to be re-educating myself. But what do I know? Well I do know I love to write, but I am not sure if I am really good at it. So, I am going to reapply myself to the literary arts, and go back to school.

Anyway, I love to write. I didn’t know I loved to write, till I started playing role playing games. Role playing games gave me the liberty of creating a character that I could do with as I saw fit. He could be good, in the way Robin hood was good, and that was okay. He/she could be tall, or strong, or good with a bow an arrow. The atmosphere gave me an opportunity to express myself in ways I hadn’t been able to before. When asked how my character had come to be where his is now, I was introduced to the Back Story Concept. The Back Story Concept allows for an individual to create a story of their characters history, their triumphs, their struggles, their loss, their motivation. I thought this was awesome.

Now today,one 110K MS later, so many years have past since that first backstory. I find myself writing, not only about one character, but about many. I am creating a whole new world with different races and history. Writing just flows from me like a river, and so now I write for the love of writing. So here’s to those who created role playing games, and here’s to those who had the courage to play pretend out in the open where everyone could see, and here’s to the Role Players all over the world who found a place they could be themselves and feel safe.

May your stories live on in the hearts in minds of all of us who read them.

So I finally got my agent query proofed and vetted by someone who has already gotten requests from her own queries, (thank you so much Elise), and so that is amazing! I am so excited about getting to the next step in my writing journey. So what do I do I start looking for agents to query, and what do they ask for? All the agents I have found have pretty much the same submission process: Send a Synopsis and the first five pages of your MS.

What?! A Synopsis? Oh, and not just a regular synopsis, but one that reveals the ending. I mean that kills the book right? Do you really want to read the book? I mean I get it, they receive a lot of queries and they only want to read the ones that they think are interesting. However, there are all these rules and guidelines out there for a good novel Synopsis, yet none of them seem to apply to me. I am sure they do, but it doesn’t feel that way right now.

Okay, so I am not sure if everyone who writes a fiction story has as much fun as I do when I write. I mean I read stories on blogs about how people struggle with what to write next, or what there next books characters are going to do. Me I write from the hip. I let it flow. All the scenes and the characters, they just fly from my mind to the screen.

Is this normal. Do other writers do this? Well I asked google and here is what it said: read

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

Created by Randy Ingermanson – “the Snowflake Guy”

America’s Mad Professor of Fiction Writing

Now I kinda relate to this guy, because our day jobs match up. However, I don’t agree with the organization routine. A story is organic. Its is spontaneous. I believe that a story writes itself. I have not been to college for writing. I went to college for Computer Science, explicitly for Software Engineering. Now one thing I can tell you about software, is that you have to think of every possible and impossible thing a user might do with it. That means you have to imagine, what they would do with it.

This is part of software design. Most software engineers are creatives of some kind. It takes a certain type of mind to work at the monotony of writing source code. It is gratifying when you solve a problem, or when something you wrote comes to life and actually gets used by someone however, in order to get to that point you have to imagine what that software would be like.

This is where things differ, I write from the hip. My stories are born not made. They come to me as easily as the wind blows the leaves across my driveway during the fall. There is no timeline, no story board, no silo of ideas and sub ideas, plots and sub plots; there is only the story. It weaves itself as it will. Now don’t get me wrong, all those things can be incredibly useful, and necessary sometimes when a stories make-up starts to get unwieldy. But there is no set in stone rule that says “that is who you must do it.”

Every line I write flows from the one before it. The story is rich and new, and the imagination is in full bloom in this way. When we let our imagination flow, without restriction, or confinement, we give it the wings it needs to soar to new heights, and that is where the new stories come from. The more you let you imagination have its way with you words, the more you find that what your writing has never been written before.